Ed. Note:  I admit a fascination with Jewish partisans during WWII.  Apparently, they are to make a film of this particular story of partisans from Belarus, starring Daniel Craig (the new James Bond).

Jewish partisans remembered; their story to hit the big screen
By Yossi Melman

“Killing a man is like smoking a cigarette,” Itzke Resnik, known as a man of few words, was accustomed to say. Resnik, who passed away nine years ago in Canada, was one of the intrepid fighters in the so-called Bielski commandos, a Jewish group of partisan fighters headed by the Bielski brothers who fought the Nazis from their base in the forests of Belarus.

They did not hesitate to eliminate Jewish snitches and collaborators and were responsible for saving 1,200 Jews from being killed in the Holocaust. Their courageous story went untold for decades but later this year a movie based on their tale and starring Daniel Craig, the current James Bond, will hit the screens. The screenplay is based on a book, “Defiance: The Bielski Partisans,” written by Dr. Nechama Tec, a sociologist from the University of Connecticut and herself a Holocaust survivor.

More at Haaretz online.

From the Lower Hudson Journal News

WEST NYACK - As a combat infantry soldier in Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army, Alan Moskin wasn’t even aware that Passover had come and gone.

There was no matzo, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, no Haggadah. Fighting in towns across Europe in the spring of 1945, Moskin, then 18, was just happy to be alive at the end of each day.

“I was on the front line, fighting during Passover,” recalled Moskin, of Nanuet, now 81. “We didn’t have time to stop and celebrate.”

Six decades later, Alan and other Jewish veterans in Rockland are making up for what they didn’t have by trying to make religious holidays more celebratory for Jewish soldiers deployed overseas.

Although combat on the ground dictates whether soldiers can take a break to celebrate Passover, the Rockland/Orange District of the Jewish War Veterans of the U.S.A. are making sure they have the religious items required to celebrate their faith.

Passover commemorates the flight of Jews from bondage in Egypt several thousand years ago. It also celebrates the coming of spring and is a reminder of the desire for freedom and people’s willingness to fight for it.

During the eight days of Passover, observant Jews shun chametz, all leavened bread and fermented grains, and recall the hardships of the Jews under Egyptian rule, during the Passover seder. They also enumerate the 10 plagues that Jews believe God brought upon the Egyptians.

This year, the Rockland/Orange District of the Jewish War Veterans, or JWV, have sent 122 care packages filled with Passover essentials as part of Operation Matzoh Meal.

The packages containing matzo; macaroons; canned gefilte fish; grape juice; Passover Haggadah, or guide to the seder; snacks and toiletries have made it to Jewish soldiers stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guam, Japan, Singapore and Korea.

“If you did get a package, it was from your parents,” Al Zeilberger, 79, of Airmont, said, recalling the time when he fought in the Korean War. Zeilberger is now co-commander of the Fred Hecht Post 425, the most active of the JWV posts in Rockland/Orange, along with Aaron Kramer, also a Korean War veteran who lives in Monsey.

“Since the wars of Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq and Afghanistan, we as soldiers are more appreciative of what soldiers out there would like,” he said.

Read more...

from Chabad.org

A Passover Haggadah inscribed by President George W. Bush is on its way to a military base in Baghdad after arriving in Kuwait Thursday. For the next week, it will make the rounds of installations throughout the region as a show of support for America’s armed forces in general and its roughly 1,000 soldiers of the Jewish faith serving in the region in particular.

“It must be very uplifting for soldiers with sand in their boots, pressing ahead in difficult conditions, to realize that their Commander-in-Chief cares so much to personally send a special message to them,” said Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the Washington, D.C., director of American Friends of Lubavitch who coordinated the effort. “I hope this will give a new vigor to troops in the theater.”

Shemtov presented two copies of the Slager edition of the Haggadah - published by Kol Menachem, it features a commentary gleaned from the teachings of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of righteous memory - to the president this week as part of an Oval Office meeting on the occasion of the 106th anniversary of the Rebbe’s birth. At the meeting, Bush signed a proclamation declaring the day Education and Sharing Day, USA.

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Passover on Wheels
by David Geffen
from the Jerusalem Post

At the conclusion of an intense and successful military Korean Pessah mission for 700 Jewish soldiers, Chaplain Oscar Mike Lifshutz wrote an eight-page summary report to Rabbi Aryeh Lev, his supervisor at the Jewish Welfare Board’s Chaplaincy Commission, on May 4, 1951. “We have just returned from the front,"Lifshutz began, “and completed a tour of our men scattered about the Korean peninsula. Operation Passover is over… let me go back, tell you about our project and how it came to be.”

The efforts of Lifshutz were already known widely through a story on Pessah in Korea by George Barrett published in The New York Times on April 22, 1951. It described a “Jewish chaplain officiating under battle conditions,” and Barrett quoted Lifshutz at the Seder stating that “when you fight for somebody else’s freedom you also are keeping your own.”

An Illinois native, Lifshutz received his smicha from the Hebrew Theological College in Chicago in 1945 and immediately entered the US Army as a chaplain. During his studies at the chaplaincy school in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, a biting description of the army’s treatment of the Jewish DPs was published in the Harrison Report by the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in September 1945. Lifshutz recognized that he would have a chance to assist the survivors of the Holocaust, and did so during the next four years he served at US Army posts in Austria.

Interestingly, he also had a hand in early Israeli history. In the summer of 1949 it was decided to bring the remains of Theodor Herzl and his family to this country for reburial in Jerusalem. As the chaplain in Vienna, where Herzl was buried, Lifshutz organized a memorial service at the main synagogue in the city. Then in his white kittel, he accompanied the honor guard from Israel which came to bring Herzl home to the land about which he had prophesied: “If you will it, it is no dream.”

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Today I’m experiencing somewhat of déjà vu.  I’ve just read the most recent post on Jewsingreen.com concerning an Orthodox chaplain—Army Captain Shmuel Felzenberg – serving in Afghanistan.  The article is by Lee Lawrence, correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor.

In describing Chaplain Felzenberg’s kosher dietary needs, Lawrence says that Felzenberg has “Army-supplied kosher meals. For holidays like Passover, the Army provides supplies, right down to Passover-approved wine.”

The U.S. Army has obviously come a long way from my time as an army officer’s wife in Munich, Germany, where the Orthodox chaplain stationed there our first year influenced my husband and me to decide to keep kosher.  In those days we did not get kosher food items for Passover from the army; the items we did get were provided by the Jewish Welfare Board.

In my 1992 Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION, co-authored with Rabbi Karen L. Fox, here is what I wrote in the sidebar “Passover in the U.S. Army” in the chapter “Pesach – The Freedom Story”:

“During Passover of 1971 my husband was stationed with the U.S. Army in Munich.  We’d been married a little over a year and this was the first time we would be making our own seders. Needless to say, it was a little daunting to prepare for Passover far from home in a country we perceived as hostile.

“But we had assistance.  First, the Jewish Welfare Board sent “kosher for Passover” canned match ball soup, matzah and other Passover food to armed forces personnel throughout the world.  We had the basics.

“Then the Jewish army chaplain in Munich instructed us on many points.  For the first time we cleaned our kitchen to remove all chametz, even though at that time we didn’t have dishes just for Passover.  As we cleaned there was a tremendous feeling of Jewish pride as we continued the ancient Passover ritual in post-Holocaust Germany!”

Now in 2008 with the first seder less than two weeks away (the night of Saturday, April 19, this year), I’m busy preparing for the upcoming holiday.  My husband and I have been keeping kosher since our return to the United States in May of 1972.  And here in Los Angeles there are so many stores carrying “kosher for Pesach” food items. 

And I am truly grateful for the freedom to practice my religion openly – a privilege that Jews throughout the ages have infrequently enjoyed. As I type this post I have tears in my eyes for the Jewish military personnel who will be celebrating Pesach – the holiday of freedom – far from home in Iraq or Afghanistan.  As a former Mrs. Lieutenant, I know that these deployed Jewish military personnel, along with all deployed U.S. military personnel, are protecting that freedom of religion that I hold so dear.

If you want to know how to show your appreciation to U.S. military personnel, go to my website at http://www.mrslieutenant.com and click on “Support Military Families.”

Phyllis Zimbler Miller

From the November 13, 2007 edition -
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1113/p20s01-usmi.html

Military chaplains: An Orthodox rabbi mixes faith and patriotism in Afghanistan

Army Capt. Shmuel Felzenberg juggles outreach to local Muslims, interfaith counseling, and the kosher quest

By Lee Lawrence | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan

When the bus doors open, 20 soldiers clamber out, laughing, reaching for their cameras like college kids on spring break. Yet they haven’t traveled far. Part of the Army’s 82nd Airborne, they’ve driven 10 minutes across this coalition forces base from their US camp to the Egyptian-run hospital compound.

Still, in a space bound by blast-walls and concertina wire, this qualifies as an adventure because, during the next couple of hours, they will bring together two disparate worlds: that of Afghan villagers who’ve suffered the ravages of consecutive wars and that of Americans who have gathered in church basements and synagogues, private homes and community centers from New Jersey to California, filling boxes with donated items - everything from toys to toiletries.

Directly or indirectly, the boxes wend their way to the offices of US Army chaplains, who turn the distribution of donations into a feel-good outing for their soldiers.

At the helm of this base outreach program is Shmuel Felzenberg, an Army captain who darts around the grounds as soldiers unload boxes from a truck and set up tables. Under his military cap he wears a black yarmulke, and on his uniform the insignia that mark him as a Jewish chaplain - two tablets topped by a star.

“Ready to go hot,” he calls out, and the soldiers position themselves behind the tables.

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Editor’s note:  And this soldier asks, what did we ever do to you?  Just kidding!  The enthusiasm of children in helping troops both sustain morale and fulfill mitzvot is itself remarkable.

In connection with the Aleph Institute, a Chabad-Lubavitch organization that caters to Jewish military personnel serving overseas, the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn, N.Y., will be sending packages of matzah to forward bases in advance of Passover.

The museum, a project of Chabad-Lubavitch’s Tzivos Hashem children’s organization, will kick off the project, dubbed Operation: Message in a Matzah, on Wednesday. Ending on April 13, the initiative will see children bake their own matzahs from scratch and writing greetings to soldiers stationed abroad. For each matzah baked, the museum and the Bal Harbor, Fla.-based Aleph Institute will send one package of specially baked unleavened bread for use at the Passover Seder.

Army Sgt. Scott Humphrey, who has been deployed overseas four, remarked that “gestures like this make the time go by a lot faster.”

More at Chabad.org.

Mark J. Pelavin, Associate Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism made the following statement:

Each American life lost over the last five years of our military involvement in Iraq has created a tragic and profound hole that will never be filled in the lives of family, friends and loved ones.  The solemn milestone we have reached this week as we mourn the loss of the 4,000th U.S. soldier leads us to reflect that, while we may have begun this war with the justifiable goal of deposing a dictator and enhancing world safety, we continue fighting in Iraq without a clear vision for a sustainable peace, without a timetable for withdrawal, and without a metric for success. 

Jewish values demand of us that we “seek peace and pursue it” (Psalms 34:15). Current U.S. policies in Iraq are not succeeding in creating peace. After five years of this war, the world is arguably less safe, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed, and Iraq’s infrastructure remains unstable. And we are still not coming to grips with the economic costs of the war, which some now estimate to be more than $3 trillion, or $15 billion each month.

While we recognize that the surge has sharply reduced the number of fatalities in many areas of the country, we join with the broad array of political and military leaders who believe that military progress alone will not make the changes necessary for long term success in Iraq.  We believe that a call for a phased withdrawal will help keep the kind of political pressure on Iraq’s leaders that can lead to these necessary changes.

On this grim occasion, we say again: It is time to pursue a new strategy which better protects the troops who remain in Iraq and also begins to withdraw them in the most expeditious way possible. Our men and women in uniform and their families deserve nothing less.

This piece is written by Neil Block, Captain, US Navy, Retired, Lay Leader at Fort Benning, Georgia, Home of the Infantry.

Being the Jewish Lay Leader at the Army Infantry Command at Fort Benning, Georgia is a busy time consuming job.  It is more than compensated for, though, by the personal fulfillment which comes from being able to be of service to my fellow Jewish military personnel, particularly the training troops who are, in most cases, just making the arduous transition from civilian life to the military, and who most could use the insightful care and concern that this old vet can provide.  There are so many wonderful young, and not so young, people I meet along the way and the gratitude they express for being able to hold themselves out comfortably as Jews in a recognized and structured Jewish environment which our weekly Sunday morning worship services provide is great reward. (More on that last tidbit as a footnote.)

Besides, the tales gleaned from the basic trainees who include 17 years olds and 41 year olds in the same training units are priceless.  Or, of just knowing the young men who have PhDs and are enlisted as buck privates.  Or the bankers, or lawyers, or professionals and/or the others from every and all walks of life and geographic expanse who have made a conscious determination to serve this great country of ours.  But, today was an especially interesting day and I just had to share it.  Three serendipitous cosmic convergences occurred this morning which merited telling.

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Editor’s note:  Chabad Lubavitch has really been out there supporting the troops.  This is the kind of material one really enjoys posting.

HILTON HEAD, S. CAROLINA—(March 21, 2008)
Dvora Lakein

In a speech hailed by one priest as the most inspiring talk since Martin Luther King Jr., Chabad Rabbi Yossi Jacobson addressed the Chief of Chaplains Senior Leader’s Training Conference on March 6, 2008.

As the featured religious speaker at the event in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Rabbi Jacobson was the first rabbi to ever address the United States Military’s annual chaplaincy event.

His invitation came at a very difficult time for the U.S. Military Chaplains. Two-star General Chief of Chaplains Doug Carver later reflected, “We are broken, but Rabbi Jacobson helped us find light within our brokenness.”

During the five-day conference, General Carver and other advisors tried to instill faith within the beleaguered chaplains’ hearts. These spiritual advisors “have grown tired and stressed in the midst of providing ministry and support to those who are fighting the war,” said General Carver of the seven-year battle in Iraq and the general war against terrorism. The goal of the conference is to provide them with the religious strength to continue their personal battle.

Colonel Yakov Goldstein, also a Chabad rabbi, who has been in the military for more than three decades and is currently the highest ranking Jewish chaplain, was approached by conference organizers a year ago. Coordinators wanted his help to create a “different kind of event,” in what would be General Carver’s first year as chief of chaplains. They specifically wanted a Jewish speaker to “break the Christian paradigm.”

Read more here.